Naughty Dog “extensively” explored new Jak & Daxter before The Last of Us

Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells has said the newly-founded second team at the studio was initially throwing around ideas for a new Jak & Daxter on PS3 before starting work on The Last of Us.

The story of the studio’s second team’s formation has been told before, but Wells said in the latest Game Informer it “extensively” looked at bringing Jak & Daxter to PS3.

“We’d all talked about it in interviews with fans asking, ‘Where’s the next Jak & Daxter?’ I don’t know if this is going to make them happy or sad, but we did explore the idea fairly extensively,” said Wells. “Something that we talked about early on was, ‘Lets go back and apply what we’ve learned with the Uncharted games to Jak & Daxter.’ It’s one of the franchises that’s near and dear to us, and, in all honesty, we’d like to somehow honour.”

But exploration talks, obviously, failed.

“Even if we felt like we’re going to give the fans another Jak & Daxter, we felt we weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted. We would end up limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted. We just realised we were going to just do everybody a disservice. So at that point, the conversations started to move in a new direction.”

Wells did throw fans a bone regarding the series, noting the Uncharted team could still handle development on a brand new J&D. Don’t hold your breath, though.

“Naughty Dog’s got a long history and I think it’s got a long future, so to say we’ll never go back is kind of crazy. But right now, we’ve got this new IP that we’re definitely going to be supporting,” he said. “I guess there’s a possibility the Uncharted team could move on to Jak & Daxter. It’s still up in the air, but I wouldn’t think that’s going to happen because I think we’d run into all of the same problems with that team that we did with this team.”

The first Jak & Daxter, The Precursor Legacy, launched in 2001 following the studio’s buy-out by Sony earlier in the year. Naughty Dog would go on to release three more titles in the series, the final being Jak X in 2004 for PS2. A HD collection, featuring Jak 1, 2 and 3, launches this week for PS3.

The developer is currently working on The Last of US. Get new details on that here.

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